Who lives here?

Doing the house up

February 05, 2018

It wasn't intended but I've been sorting so many things out I just didn't have enough energy to blog about anything. Over the last couple of months we've had good things and not-so-good things happen, mostly not-so-good things but we strove to find the silver linings. Not always easy.

We purchased a couple of male castrated nine-month old sheep just before Christmas, with the aim of getting them to munch down the grass in the paddock and 'trim' the hedges on the inside, then send them to the abattoir in June. They've certainly got the grass under control...

..but they also broke Georgie's leg a couple of weeks ago by kicking him. We've paid out, so far, a four-figure sum for the operation to pin his broken hind leg in two places, and he is on cage rest for eight weeks, four of those in a collar to stop him licking the wound. After two weeks, he is howling every day with the indignation of being a prisoner.

We had no heating from mid-December to third week of January. The water pump broke, a pipe got blocked, then the boiler gasket collapsed and the flue shattered, pumping exhaust gases into the house. The repairs will last six months then we will need a new boiler - 25 years service is enough - and that boiler has to be moved from the utility room as it contravenes every regulation and law.

Our phone line went down for nearly 10 days on 22nd December ...and then again for a few more days in the middle of January. Mouse damage, high winds snapping the line, corrosion, and broken master socket in the house..the list when on and on.

The mains water pipe fractured in the street so that was a few days of drinking yellow silty water while they dug up the street and fixed it. The yellow water (from iron deposits) dyed my white towels a subtle pastel shade when I did a wash.

We had a mouse move in, going backwards and forwards from underneath the cooker to the pantry, It managed to consume 1.2kg of lentils and peed over everything before we noticed.

Oh, and the mushrooms didn't grow so I've turfed those out and it's back to the drawing board there.

Now the good stuff

I got a bonus and a pay rise.

Our emergency savings and cat 'vet fund' meant we had the money to pay for Georgie's operation without touching the bonus.

We won't have to pay for any of the phone work repairs bar, perhaps, the master socket, as that is inside the house.

We got a £52 rebate/apology from the water company.

The mouse was caught and I cleaned out the pantry from top to bottom. This led to three boxes of surplus kitchen items earmarked and moved to the barns for the next car boot sale. Win win.

I managed to decorate my hobby room in the New Year (teal & grey). I bagged the curtains and bedding for it half price thanks to Black Friday and Christmas discounts. The new carpet will have to wait until the cash is put back in the savings/vet kitty though and the boiler is paid for.

I've given up drinking tea and coffee except for the occasional treat. I was drinking 10+ cups a day. Efforts to cut down or switch to sweeteners didn't work so I went the whole hog. It took two weeks for me to feel better. Messed with my hormones something terrible.

I have not been in a charity shop since the last week of December. I realised with horror I have over 100 books to read and I'm not buying any more until these are read. This means I am saving money and not bringing more stuff into the house.

There's probably about a hundred other things that happened on daily basis but I'm trying not to think about it all too much.

June 08, 2017

Life ticks along quietly here. Midnight is still recovering from her illness, but this time in solitary confinement. She spends her days outside in a private pen, well away from the other chickens, and at night she comes in and sleep under the stairs in a dog crate. Last week she seemed to have recovered enough to go back in with Twilight but went downhill again immediately. In desperation I kept her in the house, shot her full of antibiotics, which was the only thing I hadn't tried, and was delighted to see her regain her health very quickly. No more heaving for breath and swollen abdomen, and she's eating and passing food well. I'm now getting her from her invalid food back onto her normal chicken food and in a few days time she can go and see Twilight. So it was an internal infection all along. Maybe next time I'll try antibiotics first.

I've just ordered the carpet for the living room, which is the final step in its redecoration. That should be delivered any day now and then I'll get the carpet fitter in. I wasn't able to stick to my remaining budget for the room, as I had based it on the dimensions taken by the estate agent - 3.95m x 6.9m. When I measured accurately, however, I found it was actually 4.1m by 7.2m, so I had to order an extra metre in both length and width. I also forgot I needed to pay a carpet fitter.

I did, however, save some money by exercising my creative muscles and repurposing some left over curtain linings to make lightweight curtains in the lobby. I wanted to replace the lobby curtains as they were a bit tatty and too short to use a tieback with, but I didn't want to spend a lot of money in case we overhauled the lobby at some point and changed what was at the windows. I'm not very keen on the curtain poles to be honest, as the former owner has not fitted them straight and gold is not my thing, but they will do for a good while longer.

I had bought a fourth set of 54cm x 90cm curtains to make the living room pelmets out of, and after finishing I was left with a pair of linings plus a large remnant to make cushions with. All I had to do was take the two linings off the remains of the curtains, hem the two pieces neatly, then turn them 90 degrees and sew heading tape to the narrowest end.

I already had the heading tape in my sewing kit so this was a nice cheap project that turned out ok!

Good job I can be thrifty when I have to be. The fridge thermostat blew out overnight after the power was restored following the lines coming down in strong winds.

We're just not prepared to buy a new fridge yet. We were planning to buy a bigger one next month once MIL had moved in, as the small under counter one is inadequate for three of us, but that was next month, not now. I'm not putting it on a credit card, so I've just put an ad on Freegle to see if someone has one they don't want. Then next month I'll put it back on Freegle when they new one arrives. Failing that, we'll get a cheapie secondhand one from local ebay and go pick it up.

Just remembered we still haven't replaced our broken microwave either, as MIL has a working one she is bringing with her. It annoyed me at first not being able to cook veg quickly but I don't actually miss it anymore. I just use the pressure cooker, which has a veg cooking function.

April 12, 2017

Thought I'd show you the bargain lights we managed to snaffle off eBay.

I was looking at spending about £150 (£70/80 per light) to replace the living room lights for something of a similar style and weight. I do not like brass fixtures and fittings, and the existing lights looked very old-fashioned. I looked into painting them with chalk paint and replacing/recovering the shades, but there would still have been a reasonable cost and no guarantee of them looking good afterwards.

I found the brushed nickel lights on eBay, about 40 minutes away from us, for £20 the pair. They are immaculate. They even came with lightbulbs.

I'm a very happy camper.

Now I just have to find an equivalent bargain for carpet and curtains.

March 09, 2017

I've spent the last few days trying to tame the paper tigers in anticipation for getting some larger animals on our smallholding.

We know we are going to get some pigs this year, which requires some complex navigating through a sea of rules and regulations and I'm nearing the end of it. The swine flu epidemic resulted in very strict laws being laid down to reduce the impact of outbreaks and have better traceability of animals from 'farm to fork'.

Anyway, we have registered for this, that and the other in varying departments in DEFRA and we have all the bits of paper we need. As we're legal and above board, talks have commenced with a breeder of Gloucester Old Spots. The next time I talk about pigs to you, they will be here hopefully. In the meantime, I've turned my attention to grass and paddock maintenance, as it desperately needs a trim and even out. I've taken care of the lawns myself, giving everything cut on the highest setting. The half acre paddock is something else though.

I have a nice local man with a compact tractor coming in to top it off. Might also get him to either harrow or roll it flat, as it has quite a few uneven spots and a few hillocks to smash flat. I couldn't hire the equipment and do it for twice what he's doing it for so I'm a happy bunny :)

In the house, I'm waiting for some paint to arrive so I can get on with painting the bottom half of the living room wall at the weekend. I managed to get a coat of white over the red and try a few testers out. Just need to get on and finish that job so I can move all of the furniture back into place and give it a good spring clean. Still keeping an eye out for bargain on lighting, carpets and curtains but nothing yet.

This weekend it will also be time to sort out the veg boxes on the patio. I have soil to mix up and distribute between them, and then they will be covered over to let the soil warm up (and stop the cats acquiring new litter trays!). Planting will begin at the end of March.

Despite attempts to keep a lid on the finances this month, I suspect it will be a bit of an expensive one. What with pigs and their paraphernalia, paddock maintenance, a new pressure cooker, and suddenly going so blind I've had to have an official eye test and order glasses, I think March is going to be a shocker financially.

However, to balance that the heating will be going off soon, we're still eating out of the freezers, and our petrol consumption has dropped to less than £60 a month. Add in no council tax this month and the (hoped for) drop in the electricity bill we'll be ok and still make our savings goal.

I'm really looking forward to spring. I haven't been this excited for many years!

February 27, 2017

But the reality is I was reading for most of it. I've got back into the personal development books again after seeing that Tools of Titans by Tim Ferris had been published. As you can see, I found a lot of interesting stuff in there to revisit :)

I do this every six months or so - gorge myself on personal development books and then spend a few months mentally digesting them, sorting out my ideas, and changing my mindset. Sometimes there is something really good in them and I have a lightbulb moment, things click into place and I change immediately.

I started reading self-development books back in 2000 when I lived in the States. There was a book shop at the end of my road, and it had a large section of self-help books. I was hooked from the moment I sat down with the first one, which I remember very clearly was Wayne Dyer's Pulling Your Own Strings (originally published in 1978). I was so fired up after reading it that from then on I repeatedly stood up to my exceptionally horrible narcissistic boss (who has SEVEN serious complaints upheld against him by the faculty but was never sacked), eventually told him to get stuffed, got back on a plane to the UK and starting living how I wanted. It was powerful life-changing stuff. Every couple of years I still read it and I still find it as relevant now as I did 17 years ago. I've eliminated a lot of bullies from my 'inner circle' - some completely and am strictly 'no contact' with them. Life is too short to put up with someone trying to make you feel bad so they can feel good.

So, Tim Ferriss' book led onto other books and then to ideas and other books, and finally here I am, surfacing at the end of February thinking "was I reading for that long?" I did promise myself I would start decorating the lounge after Christmas, and so finally I made a start this weekend out of guilt.

I'm only painting the dado rail, and the wall underneath it - I find red too strong a colour when I'm trying to wind down of an evening. It also darkens the room considerably. The ceiling and the rest of the wall are newly painted by the look of it so I'm leaving them. In addition I am changing the curtains, lights and carpet. That will come over the next few months though as I source bargains, but in the meantime the wall and dado rail are cheap updates.

I also managed to do three other things this month that I've been writing in my journal I wanted to do.

I've started walking. I found a local shop and almost every day I walk a three mile round trip. I drink my green smoothie for energy and hit the footpath in my walking boots.

I've started doing yoga. I've found that just 20 minutes helps me combat sitting at a desk no end so I wobble along to a DVD for 20 minutes every evening after a shower. No matter how strong you think you are, yoga will show you otherwise.

I have set out a plan for how I want to earn more streams of income. Tim Ferriss found that wealthy people tend to have at least seven different streams of income. The average Joe has one - their job. Lose that and you lose all of your income. I was immediately struck by the idea. I'll never be wealthy sticking with what I am doing - I'm 44 now and the years are passing, and while Martin and I have pots of money, those pots are reliant on being added to every month by our salaries and some freelance income. We need more pots and they need to grow quicker. I don't want to be wealthy, I want to be financially independent. So, I set up a spreadsheet, wrote a list of 45 things I could do, then started categorising them according to short term (can do now with no money), medium term (might need a pot of money to fund it) or long term (needs more money and time investment than I have). I whittled it down to six short-term ideas for generating income and started on those. Around Easter I'll revisit it and look at the medium term schemes, as any income for the short-term schemes can be used to 'seed fund' those.

January 21, 2015

Well, I've spent the last six days decorating my hobby room, trying to turn it into a properly functioning study room for both of us.

What I didn't realise was that the previous owners had decided to hold the walls up using glue and wafer thin wallpaper.

It's taken six days and I am still not done prepping the walls.

Here's a few more of the highlights...

The first picture is the room vent with the grille taken off. For some reason, instead of putting the grille over the edge of the plaster, they plastered it into the walls. To get it off to be stripped and repainted, I had to take off the plaster, at which point the rest above came off. That whole corner of the room plaster is unstable so today I face the decision whether to hack it off and replaster, or take off the worst, repair, then stabilise the rest. I already have a grille stripped and painted to replace it. Martin did a fabulous job spraying it with enamel.

The second picture shows the plaster below the windowsill, which just came away in my hand. The whole lot about six inches below was blown, but I'm currently buying B&Q out of ready mix plaster and carefully reconstructing it. That's if I can keep the cats off. I found a perfect back paw print squished into one bit if it yesterday.

I'll spare you the pictures of the gaps between the ceiling and the wall which allows disintegrating insulation, dirt and mouse droppings from the loft to shower down into the room.

January 15, 2015

I'm aware from looking at many of my favourite blogs that I've hardly blogged at all lately.I've not felt very inspired to be honest, which isn't helped by my seasonal affective disorder.

With nothing but a few leeks and some kale, there's not much to blog about regarding food production in the garden. I managed to bag some seville oranges going cheap last Friday so I made 8lb of whisky marmalade at the weekend. I added that to current store, which sits inside a bargain I found on ebay just before Christmas - a handmade wood countertop cupboard.

In November I noticed there were still uneaten jams from 2012 in the back of my undercounter food cupboard, so I had obviously been reaching down and just grabbing the nearest pot every time with no regard for dates. In addition I seemed to be operating with less and less counter space as the years roll by. Part of that is my love for foodie gadgets - food processor, toaster, halogen oven, microwave, slow cooker - all of which were taking up space oon the counter as they have no permanent home. I spotted this one after a quick search on ebay and managed to bag it £20. As it sat against a wall, one side has no paint and there is a little tile grout, but otherwise it is in very good condition and painted in a farrow and ball colour. In time I will repaint it completely, but as its condition is so good it is not high on my list of priorities at the moment. In the meantime, most of the foodie gadgets are now put away in the cupboard where the jams and bottled fruit and veg were kept

Although it is too early to plan anything concrete for the garden, I have decided this year I will be sticking to growing what we eat most frequently bar potatoes and peas (because I can't grow them that cheap!) and no extras. Being honest, I grow a lot of different things but only some of them work well, the rest are a waste of space, time and compost.

I want to focus on growing only what we eat, look after that well and actually produce substantial quantities that will provide many meals. Well "doh" you might say, but actually what happens is I take up space growing things that might not do well in the climate or type of soil or conditions I'm trying to grow them in, which means I only get small quantities of the stuff that does do well because I've used the rest of the space to grow something that does poorly.

For example take pots and containers. Last year I realised after years of growing strawberries in pots that I rarely get anything substantial from them because they dry out too fast and I cannot keep them watered adequately while I am out at work. My biggest crops come from those in raised beds so why do I continue to do this every year? Ditto potatoes. I take up valuable space growing potatoes when they cost about £2.00 for 2.5kg and I don't get a substantial crop at all. This year I am ditching the idea of growing anything bar lettuce in containers and no space will be wasted with potatoes.

The other thing that will be happening this year is finishing the house. There are three main areas left to be done - the living room, my hobby room, and the back area of the house. There are lots of small bits and pieces to be done, like a carpet in one bedroom, some tiling downstairs, etc etc, which we will sort out when we find a bargain, but generally it is just those three big areas now.

So, I have just taken annual leave to crack into my hobby room and turn it into a study for both of us. No matter how hard I try, my hobbbies are scattering themselves around the house and not being kept neatly in my hobby room. My knitting machine is in the conservatory bolted down to the dining table, and my needlepoint, knitting and patchwork is spread between the living room and back bedroom. I realised that is because I need space for some of these things and the hobby room is too small to provide it. Martin's hobby room is bursting at the seams with paperwork relating to the car club and classic car memorabilia so what he really needs to be able to keep most of it in filing cabinets. Due to the quantity of modelling gear he has in the back room there is no space for a filing cabinet or two.

I did start taking off the wallpaper in the hobby room while the bathroom was being done in June and got about half way through before I had to stop, so hopefully that horrible bit of wall preparation won't take long!

October 10, 2014

First we had a leak from the isolator valve in the upstairs toilet. Martin fixed that, and everything has dried out nicely now.

The dishwasher decided not to bother rotating its arms any more. Given the cost of the replacement parts and it being over 10 years old it wasn't worth fixing, so I bought another one from John Lewis and managed to get a £30 trade in. That's being delivered tomorrow.

Then my laptop display packed up. I took it apart and managed to isolate the problem to a specific part, but given the cost of the replacement part, all the other parts I'd have to take out of the way to get to it, and the ancient status it had achieved (10 years old), I decided not to fix it. Instead I bought a bluetooth wireless keyboard for my iPad for £60, found a good word processing app and created my own mini laptop instead.

Then to annoy me further, the washing machine packed up this morning. The electrics have been dodgy for a while and I did promise myself I would look at it this week. This time it stopped in the middle of a cycle and I could not get the machine to do anything but fill up with water, even on the drain function. By the time the water had reached three quarters of the way up the door this morning, I knew the fill time-out had gone and I was in trouble so it had to be done immediately.

After switching the water off, unplugging and draining 40 litres of water out using a bucket, I popped off the three screws that held the top in place and slid it out. The plastic housing that holds all the electrics is held in place by three screws into to the machine. The housing had shaken itself loose, cracked the plastic surrounds off on two of the screws and was hanging limply down and pulling at the electric cables. This had put a strain on all of the connections, hence the flickering and lack of display. Given the amount of vibration the poor thing has had to deal with over the years I'm not surprised something eventually snapped.

As a temporary fix the housing has been repositioned and duct-taped into place to stop it vibrating, but each of the electric cables will have to be tested while it is running to see if any have sustained damage or whether it is more serious. A cable I can replace easily and cheaply, a PCB module on the other hand will be £85 + postage. That's when I'll have to make the decision whether to get a new one machine as it only cost us £150 originally when Martin bought it from a appliance testing and certification site exactly five years ago. It had only done five washes so the organisation could confirm it operated safely as the manufacturer claimed, but even so we managed to get £350 off the price.

In the meantime, I've put it back together and am running a few test washes to see if it will keep going for a bit longer.

October 04, 2014

Martin and I are both off work at the same time this coming week so we will be puttering around the property doing bits and pieces together. As the weather is forecast to be bad, he will be splitting his time between his latest car rebuild project when the rain stops and helping me get a few jobs done in the house when it pours.

We didn't expect the first job to be coping with water pouring inside the house. We woke up this morning to find a puddle in the downstairs bathroom and water dripping off the light fitting.

We whipped off the bath panel and found water seeping out from under the marmoleum. We tracked it back behind the toilet, taking off the boxing, and found water pouring out of the shut off valve from the toilet cistern.

Luckily, we have accumulated quite a stash of plumbing equipment over the years and found a replacement valve quite quickly. This is our plumbing box and I check it regularly to make sure all the important stuff is in there, like blowtorch, solder, PTFE tape, spare valves, washers, freezing spray and various push-fit plumbing bits. I have a separate stash of copper and plastic piping.

I organised all of our DIY stuff into different boxes and buckets so it's easy just to grab the right one when we need it instead of hunting in different places. I have ones for electrical work, wallpapering, painting, plastering, general decorating (sandpaper, hammers, various tapes, screws and nails, etc) and flooring.

It's taken Martin about an hour to find and fix the problem, and saved us a several hundred pounds in plumber's costs. We'll leave all of the boxing off and the windows open so it can all dry off quickly. We've taken off the downstairs light fitting, poured out the water and started to let that and the ceiling dry out. We've had a fairly consistent drip off the electrical cable every 10 seconds all day, which gave us cause to wonder if we had a second leak under the floor, but gradually the drip started slowing by 3pm, and this evening we're at one drip every three minutes or so. The floor upstairs is made of chipboard and that has probably absorbed the water and is now letting it drip back out. Thankfully, I used several coats of bathroom paint on the ceiling, which has stopped the water coming through so there is no water stain.

Tonight we'll put a small fan heater in the room to get some warm air into the ceiling space and helped dry things out, but I *think* we have managed to avert a disaster.

September 06, 2014

I went into work on Monday, only to find that there was enough work for me for the day, but not for Tuesday or Wednesday. Unfortunately that sometimes happens when you work for a business that has end of month filing deadlines. However, the beauty of being part time is that, unlike my full time counterparts, I can switch my working days around and slot them into a week later on in the month when I know it is going to be busy.

So, I've been here since Tuesday doing DIY and winter prepping. The former, as ever, involves stripping and painting metal doorframes, a task so dull I've come to hate it. BUT as of this week I only have one doorframe left to do in the house, and I have already part stripped and cleaned that last Christmas before wallpapering the lobby.

However, it has not been the easiest of tasks with Fleagle around. She sat in the bathroom watching me every day. Everytime I put on the paint stripper I had to carry her out of the room to make sure she didn't brush up against it. When I sat on the floor to get down to the last bits of the frame, she decided that the fabric of my skirt was an ideal resting spot.

Was there ever a cat that was so cute but oh so very annoying...it's like having a toddler.

Anyway, winter prepping has been going on since the Bank Holiday weekend. I walked round the house and garden, took stock of what needed to be done and have given myself a deadline of six weeks to complete it all. I'll post the list of jobs that I do each year this week - it might help some of you make plans to winter-proof your own homes before the bad weather hits.

This week I have managed to clean the conservatory roof, which was heaving with moss that had come off the main house roof. Talk about an ordeal. My arms are not long enough, even with a massive long mop, to reach the apex of the rood panels from below so I had to do a two-pronged attack from above and below. Irritatingly, there was part of one panel - a section of about 6" x 18" - I just could not get to no matter what ladder I used or angle I came at it from. I resorted to chucking hot soapy water at it from above to get the worst off, but you can still see if from below. In the end I pulled up the blind inside so you can't see it!

However, from the window I spotted another task that needed doing - de-mossing the back room roof.

If I don't, the first heavy downpour will see the moss block the gutter (worse that in is!), and the water will spill over and come in under the back door to flood the utility area. The garden grass rake is going to come in very handy for grabbing that lot.

This week I've also been clearing out all the manky corners of the house too, with the utility area coming under close scrutiny for cleaning. Over the spring and summer months it becomes a gardening dumping ground, so I had sorted it out, relocated a ton of stuff back to where it should be and given it all a good wipe down. It could do with a lick of white paint, but I can do that very quickly when I get to the last bits of the bathroom emulshioning. In fact, all the walls in that area could do with a quick going over with white paint, so when I have the small roller out I'll give it a once over.

I've unearthed a lot of winter textiles from their respective corners, and washed and dried those ready for winter.

All the radiators and grills have been scrubbed, defurred and dusted, so when the heating goes on I don't get a massive allergy attack as a year's worth of dust and cat fur flies up out of them into the atmosphere. The cats have a tendency to sit on the radiators to keep warm during the winter and can build up quite a pile of loose fur under the grills :)

The hobby room had turned into an awful dumping ground, so I cleared that out and tidied it properly. I managed to turf out two bags of rubbish, as well as four carrier bags for the charity shop and three to the tip shop. It's looking nice and clear in there now.

And what for the weekend? Rest? Relaxation? Car boot sale? Nope, not this weekend. While I have the energy I want to finish off some more jobs as work will now ramp up steadily towards the end of the month.

I have the conservatory to clean out, as that has also turned into a dumping ground, and a few small projects to finish off. There's the other bedside table left over from my February auction snuffles that needs a quick sand over and light coat of varnish. This is its mate, already done and in place.

The two prayer stands, also from my February snuffles (seen here in the auction hall), need cleaning and putting in place in the back bedroom.

Finally, I want to finish this pouffe. My father gave this to me a few months ago, but it had the most horrendous 1980s peach upholstery fabric and rusty castors. So I took it apart, threw out the castors, and put on some leftover upholstery fabric on it. I still have to put some edging in place to neaten up the fabric joins, screw the lid back on and then re-fit the castors, hopefully in the same holes. It shouldn't take more than a couple of hours to finish off.